A Single-Motor Vibration-Driven Microrobot with Terrain Adaptability for Robust Cross-material Locomotion

Vibration-driven microrobots for confined space applications (e.g., pipeline inspection, disaster relief) suffer from poor trajectory accuracy due to inherent sensitivity to surface friction variations, and conventional fixed-parameter PID controllers fail to tackle nonlinear dynamics like abrupt friction transitions and initial heading deviations-key limitations in unstructured environments. This paper presents a 2.9 g ultralight vibration-driven microrobot integrated with a fuzzy adaptive control strategy for robust locomotion on heterogeneous surfaces. Systematic experiments conducted on wood, acrylic, aluminum and cross-material composite surfaces show that the proposed control reduces the trajectory error to ~ 25 mm on low-friction surfaces and significantly suppresses error accumulation under cross-material transition conditions, outperforming traditional PID control. This work addresses the core challenge of friction sensitivity in vibration-driven microrobots to advance their development, and provides a solution for their reliable operation in real-world dynamic surface scenarios.